All of the lights

[rockmarooned]

After the Mountain Goats extravaganza on Friday, Marisa and I spent Saturday in Philadelphia with Bayard and Alex. We hit the Philadelphia Book Festival, which as a science-fiction-friendly and science-fact-averse English major I'm surprised to report was sort of upstaged by the Philadelphia Science Festival. Maybe some people dropped out due to

Comments

[slightlyoffaxis]

Things

[rockmarooned]

I forgot all about that song because it wasn't in the top 30 or 40 when I was looking through those Billboard charts. Yeah, I like that one. It probably says something about my whiteness that I prefer my R&B/"urban"/Top 40 type songs to sound more like Lily Allen.

[slightlyoffaxis]

We have to figure out why you think this kind of behavior is acceptable from Jessie J, but not Jason Mraz.

[maggith]

I am sad I missed Scream 4. I agree about it being all about the audience experience. I had a phenomenal audience experience with Scream The Original, that makes me super nostalgic: We went to the $2 second-run movie theater with eight or so kids in two rows. Some had seen the movie already and were just along for the $2 fun. I sat in front of some that had seen it before, and when the movie went for big shocks, they waited and timed it and then grabbed my shoulders at just the right moment. It was terrifying and amazing. Laughed a whole lot.

I haven't listened to a ton of Nicki Minaj, but some of her solo stuff is not my taste at all (sappy Rihanna lite?), and nothing else I've heard of hers sounds like her verses on Monster. And I don't understand why not, because those verses are so fun!

[rockmarooned]

This is perhaps a little crude, but I saw the first one with just one buddy of mine, and it wasn't quite as raucous as the sequels (not being opening weekend of a sequel everyone was pumped to see), but I do remember my buddy, who had a big thing for Neve Campbell, getting seriously (which is to say comically) pretty furious when they winkingly cut away from her doing a nude scene. (This also means that I thought of him years later when I saw When Will I Be LovedI'm also pretty sure I slammed his hand in a car door on the way to the movie. So it was a bad day all around for him. Sorry about that, Nik

[freakjaw]

Re: Lady Gaga - I don't have much to say about her musically, since I don't really know her stuff outside of what I've heard on TV or at the movie theater (or what those kids at the movie theater were singing when I saw Despicable Me) and I tend to defer to your judgment anyway on what makes a Good Pop Song. But I bristled a bit at that drive-by shot about her being "faintly condescending". Not entirely sure what you mean there but isn't she pretty consistently on message about that kind of thing? She certainly seems to practice what she preaches, with her Madonna/Frank N. Furter/Great Gonzo persona that seems constructed less to appeal to drooling dudes than to give her pleasure/actualization or celebrate an LGBTWhatever audience. Condescending or not, I get the impression (some of it definitely second or third hand from Tom) that she really has struck an empowering chord with (at least some of) her audience.

Re: Britney - I don't remember if you or Marisa are the reason I read this in the first place, but Marisa's assessment

[freakjaw]

Re: Scream 4 (Don't Read This, I'm Going To Talk About The Ending!) - I thought the movie was a real mixed bag, with some ideas I was excited by and some characters I liked, and a busload of other characters and a screenplay that could have used a lot more refining. They didn't do a particularly good job of integrating the returning characters and the high school storyline, the cast was enormous and the demands of the whodunit narrative meant that we didn't get to know some of the new characters as much as I would have liked, and it got a little creaky when so many characters have to leave wander off-screen just to make sure they were still credible red herrings. But while there were missed opportunities, sloppiness, and maybe even an excess of ambition in this new movie, I did feel like it was trying (struggling! sometimes failing!) to engage in the trends/tropes/rules of horror movies more than either of the other two sequels (correct me if I'm wrong, since I haven't seen either sequel since shortly after they came out on video

MORE SPOILERS

[rockmarooned]

There is some rumbling online about whether the hospital sequence at the end was the "original" ending in the script or as originally shot (they did some reshoots earlier this year), or if maybe Kevin Williamson's earlier "sketched out new trilogy" would've taken off from slightly earlier in Scream 4... but that may just be typical movie-fan "I know the real/better ending" BS. I really liked the ending (and the silly but fun crazy opening) as it was, though I think it would've had more power if the movie hadn't scrambled so much on its way there, more concerned with, yeah, red herrings than the actual characters. To that end -- the scrambling nature of it, I mean, which, don't get me wrong, resulted in many enjoyable bits -- I don't know that they were really engaging in trends/tropes/rules of horror (and you're right, Scream 3 was already stretching to talk about the "rules of trilogies" which barely exist at all) so much as bringing all of it up so no one could accuse them of overlooking anything

Re: MORE SPOILERS

[freakjaw]

Seriously, stop reading if you don't want to know the ending
Yeah, there was a definite running-through-a-checklist-vibe to some of the references this time around ("here's what's wrong with torture horror and J-horror...there, we mentioned them"), and I'd be genuinely curious to find out whether this was Williamson's original ending. I too liked the ending, in part because it violently and explicitly made it clear that they were ultimately more interested in making a slasher movie about middle-aged (or almost middle-aged?) people than they were in the younger characters, but it did leave me kind of baffled regarding the "second trilogy" talk. (Also, I thought it was weirdly not suspenseful, since at that point I figured if they hadn't killed Sidney in the kitchen, they weren't going to do it in the hospital.) It's interesting that if the hospital sequence was a late addition, I think it radically changes the film from being almost a Star Trek-style reboot where we'd follow the murderous-Emma-Roberts/new-evil-Sidney-substitute in